My $400 Suit Is A Venezuelan Moth-Goat
Is my suit really a Venezuelan Moth-Goat? Technically it is. But I’ll show you how thinking like this will help condition your mind to be flooded with new and unexpected ideas.If you read the post Ask Why Until Your Head Hurts, you’ll know that understanding the “why” to anything reveals the basic human truth about something. The same is true when you ask “What is this made of?” In the case of my suit, looking at the label in back tells me that it was made in Venezuela, and is 60% wool and 40% silk. Ever the inquisitive person, I searched for exactly what wool and silk are made of. I found that wool is the fiber of animals, mainly sheep, goats, llamas, and rabbits. Silk is a natural fiber that comes from cocoons made by the larva of the domesticated silkmoth. So essentially, the suit that I paid dear money for and wear to the most formal occasions was conceived by a few animal species. Thus, it’s a Venezuelan Moth-Goat.
Simplify things
I find it helps to simplify things, especially things that are very complex by asking “What makes it up?” For example, my eyes have always glazed over when it comes to financial things. I’ve heard the term “mutual fund” many times in my life, but I’ve never really understood it in its simplest context. To understand the term, I looked up “mutual fund” in Wikipedia. Wikipedia helps out a lot, because there are always links that delves into parent categories that describe something. According to Wikipedia, a mutal fund is a “professionally-managed form of collective investments that pools money from many investors and invests it in stocks, bonds, short-term money market instruments, and/or other securities“.
Looking further at the definition of a “collective investment”, it’s a “way of investing money with other people to participate in a wider range of investments than may be feasible for an individual investor and to share the costs of doing so”. The link to “investing” is a term that is “related to saving or deferring consumption“. The link to “saving” simply means “putting money aside” for future use.
Finally, I clearly understood what a mutual fund is. It’s simply a form of saving money for use later. I understand that it’s more complicated than that, and there are other concepts involved in a mutual fund. But simplifying things provides a basis for understanding the more complicated concept.
Ask yourself what something is made of. Maybe you take for granted what it really is. What is a computer made of? What’s a calculator made of? What’s a telescope made of? What’s a mattress made of? Finding the answer to these things will help you simply them.
Learn to simplify, then complicate again
The fun part to getting ideas is finding different ways to use something. The post on What Is An Idea? defines an idea as simply using something that exists. Now that you’ve simplified things, you can figure out new ways to use what that thing is made of. Here are a few things to ponder:
- What can you make with wool and silk?
- What can you make with wool, silk, and wood?
- What can you make with just wool?
- What can you make with a moth and goat?
- How can you help people save? How about invest?
- What can you make with trees and silicon?
- What can you do with a pen and an orange?
- How can you start a business that involves Google and weddings?
How would you answer these questions? What ideas can you come up with? They don’t have to be new or creative ideas, just any ideas. Create your own questions. Ask what you’d do with one thing, or a combination of things. Doing this will give you the right questions needed to come up with all the ideas you can handle.
